I really love the aesthetics and a lot of the worldbuilding of Fallout, but so much of it is just nonsense, especially when Bethesda writes it. There is no good reason for the Brotherhood of Steel to exist in West Virginia or for the Institute to also be making super mutants in Boston but they’re marketable so they have to be in the games.
supermutants in boston? what, mark wahlberg wasn’t enough?
Genuinely this is one of the biggest reasons I was never able to get into Fallout. It’s been 200 years, pick this shit up! Why is there rubble in the middle of the floor in the house you live in!? Did the apocalypse also make everyone ridiculous slobs? Pick up a broom!
Americans lol
The trash gnomes come at night and get everything dirty again if you clean the floor.
Even if nobody had picked anything up, it’s been 200 years, the cities should look like this.
How the fuck did the Empire State Building end up in Brooklyn lol. This perspective makes no sense. Cool greenery though.
That almost makes more sense, in a weird way. If it were actually 200 years after the bombs, there would be a new high-tech society that had moved past living in burnt out buildings and shooting each other for radiation meds and expired MREs. Since they wanted to maintain the post-nuclear-chic aesthetic, they had to make everything look like it had been destroyed a week ago. If they tried to split the difference, where would it stop? You clean up the rubble on the floor, but there’s still trash everywhere outside. Clean up the trash, and you’re still living in makeshift buildings with no proper insulation, ventilation, heat, light, etc. I think you either have to go all the way in one direction or another for sake of verisimilitude, as silly as it is, and they decided that it’s Mad Max all day, every day.
It makes more sense if you interpret the extremely low population numbers displayed onscreen as canonical.
The baseball stadium shantytown has 85 people in it and they don’t seem to be having kids. The only conclusion is everyone is nearly sterile, so population sizes are so extremely low that cleaning up entire destroyed cities is basically impossible.
Though uh, nature should have destroyed a lot more stuff. This only makes sense if nuclear winter also reduced basically all weather.
And those cities are lucky that high level creatures like Deathclaws tend to mind their own business in their territory because holy shit if an endgame Deathclaw wandered into Boston it would fuggin solo Diamond City
No worries there, it’ll be level-scaled to the weakest NPC in town
I don’t know the lore of FO4 but since it’s post apocalypse wouldn’t there be roaming bandits and splintered factions which would make unification and community planning difficult?
If the reason for the bombing was due to government bullshit then people would likely be very reluctant to form larger communities.
Those bandits would become communities unto themselves given enough time.
There are kids in Diamond City IIRC. I think there’s even a school?
Oh shoot, yeah.
But like, were there even more than 4? That’s not even a village or a hamlet. In terms of pure population size, they’re basically just a campsite.
Something screwy is going on, so, infertility makes the most sense imo
In response, I present Todd Howard’s Razor: never attribute to subtle worldbuilding that which is adequately explained by bad worldbuilding.
Doyalism is boring though! I prefer to torture a Watsonian interpretation of a setting until it makes sense, no matter how badly it’s written.
That’s why I like Fallout 1 because of the first town being sandstone buildings and people with robes on. It isn’t until later on that you find people living in bombed out garbage and generally those are bad people.
Amerikkkans can’t build anything without indigenous people to genocide
Are there actually people playing Bethesda games for the plot?
Their only game with any passable writing was Morrowind. All the games after that were basically just sandboxes for mods.
look, Captain Picard told me to close shut the jaws of Oblivion and I’m not about to disobey a direct order
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Aren’t the White Legs in Honest Hearts supposed to be first nations?
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also honest hearts leans far more into the great white saviour trope than savages with its native depiction
it also deconstructs it a bit because Joshua Graham is clearly unbalanced and just likes killing and has picked this cause because it squares that with his conscience.
Meaningfully Graham is the only character of honest hearts. All the plot points are only really there for the narrative purpose of developing Graham’s character and representing aspects of him. Daniel representing his conscience, and the white legs representing his past misdeads
it’s a story that works far better read symbolically and as metaphor than as literal
yeah they’re slightly more indigenous than the legion are roman
I know it might be over done but maybe adding in Yellowstone would be a cool addition to the map
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These critiques are like 15 years old at this point. Yes, Oblivion with guns and Skyrim with guns have trash worldbuilding that makes no sense. I’m not sure what else do you expect from a game dev where their last good game is more than 2 decades old.
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Good comment.
Its everything wrong with Bethesda’s Fallout world building in micro.
Neither F3 or F4 could ever hook me the way FNV did because of reasons like this that can be felt in the atmosphere of their respective worlds.
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The fixation on the aesthetics of Fallout has led to its stagnation.
It’s one of those things capitalism ruins. For Fallout to work as a brand, there needs to be brand recognition
It’s why they still use caps after it stopped making sense and why you see Power Armor, Vault Boys, and the Brotherhood of Steel everywhere. It’s not Fallout without those aesthetics, so everything associated with those aesthetics will stay past any logical reason.
It’s kinda sad really, if you think about the implications - since the aesthetics are tied up in Americana, it’s going to be a lot harder to tell stories from perspectives other than those affected by American companies. That’s cutting off worldbuilding for several countries they played a big part in the past. They won’t sell without brand recognition.
So the world becomes smaller and less real. Nobody will break away from eating Sugarbombs or drinking Nuka Cola. Hairstyles and fashion will either reference the 50s or just have vague Mad Max vibes. You’ll never spend the majority of your time outside of the US wasteland.
The world becomes less hopeful too. By virtue of the franchise’s premise, clear in the title, the world will only ever be ravaged by nuclear fallout. Any happy ending you get in any of the games become divorced from one another to maintain the status quo. That or a retcon or later event ruins whatever changes meaningfully in the setting. The world will never heal because Fallout needs a broken world.
It sucks because Fallout still has great potential for political commentary and satire, but it’s confined in its messaging because because it’s owned by
and they don’t want to criticize shallow consumption if their profit relies on shallow consumption.And because Bethesda insists on just cycling through their IPs, the games come out so fucking far apart. And it’s only going to increase with Starfield being added. So fallout 5 will be “wow guys, remember that game fallout 4?” And Fallout 6 will be “wow guys, remember back when you played fallout 5 over a decade ago?” So it will always be locked in the nostalgia trap, and they’ll never feel the need to say “ok we are mixing up the formula for this bi-yearly release, by going to the wastelands of southern China” or something
ironically that stagnation due to fixation on americana is very fallout
I feel like they were SO CLOSE to things making relative sense in FO4. It’s established that the Institute went west and found out about the Enclave (that’s how they have super mutants, they got the FEV from the remnants of Mariposa instead of just having another completely different program to create the same virus like in FO3) and there’s plenty of stuff that points to the commonwealth being such a shithole is because of a deliberate program of destabilization. The obvious conclusion to come to is that the Instituted has deliberately released mutants and infiltrated with synths in order to prevent the formation of an NCR equivalent, which would wipe them out.
Except then you infiltrate the Institute, and it turns none of that shit was planned, the super mutants got unleashed by mistake, and they’re not infiltrating with any purpose other than making better synths and seeing what happens.
IIRC there’s repeated mention of the Institute infiltrating and wiping out some local federation that was starting to get off the ground. Then you join the Institute and they don’t have any explanation for why they’d do that anywhere.
Thank you Todd
People obsessed with what rather than why. World building literally doesn’t matter. There are story telling reasons for why the world is this way. It’s telling a soon after post apocalypse story regardless of whether they say it’s 200 years or 1000 years after the bombs. Sure “the lore” doesn’t make sense but who cares? The writing is bad for other reasons than nerd bs like “um actually human zombies made by radiation couldn’t exist, skeletons would deteriate if left in the open for 200 years, etc…”
This way of reading stories aggravates me to no end. They wanted the reader to be reminded of the sins of the past at every corner. They wanted American capitalism and fascism to strike fear into the players heart. Did they succeed? Not really in fallout 4.
They wanted the reader to be reminded of the sins of the past at every corner. They wanted American capitalism and fascism to strike fear into the players heart. Did they succeed? Not really in fallout 4.
By Fallout 76, the “nuclear war is frightening to even imagine” vibes of The Glow in Fallout 1 had been completely swept away in favor of “LOL GET TEH LAUNCH CODES TO NUKE TEH MAP TO SPAWN LE EPIC LOOT”
World building literally doesn’t matter.
how DARE you
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Bethesda cannot and will not care about writing a good story. Their company has never really done the writing part well and never had much of an original idea. Morrowind is the high water mark of their creativity as a company and what is that really? A revenge story about a god that some other gods failed to kill, in a setting where you replace trees with mushrooms half the time and there are big insects.
Besides this one outlier, none of their games have had good writing and have leaned in on gimmicks. Large worlds to find generic quests in. Randomly generated quests to fill those large worlds with some sort of content. Samey, boring dungeons that are populated by one of three enemy factions. It’s all the fucking same shit, different game
And Fallout? They mindlessly copy the aesthetic and that’s it. It could be 2 million years in the future and there would still be skeletons on toilets and in office chairs next to working CRT computers. It’s the best they can do, copy what other people have set up/written.
Stop buying this crap. I don’t care if boycotting works or not just stop spending your money on mediocre garbage.
But i like dragon
There are problems, but I think this person doesn’t understand that the American colonists didn’t need to deal with nuclear fallout, like the thing the game is named after. The main problem is abandoned buildings and infrastructure surviving with no intervention in America when it is barely holding on as it is now.
The fact no one even cleans the floors of dirt in houses.
